Without Scars

by Jones, Ayla

  “I was thinking about producing more web series. You know, financing them. There’s a lot of good stuff out there. We have a little clout in the web series community. And we have the money…” My heart was thrashing my chest, but anyone else would’ve been convinced, because my exterior was solid. She was getting an unreadable stare from me. I made up stories for a living. I could lie for years.

  Just not to Samira.

  Her eyes got wide and her jaw pulsed. She shifted Lux’s position to higher up on her side and clutched her tighter, as if my news had frightened her. Well, if my plan was not to elicit any more concern, I’d failed. “Bullshit,” she spat. “Real, Charlie,” she demanded. “Real, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t want to do this anymore? You don’t want to write anymore? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

  “I…” My cellphone buzzed. Texts from Fallon:

  Elliott’s on his way, lucky you.

  Beta version of my app is due in a month, lucky me

  ****

  “…And that’s when I blew the guy while he cried. Life changing experience.”

  “What the fuck?” I said, looking over at Nikki, catching the frown of our cab driver. “What the hell are you talking about? What guy, Nik?”

  She was laughing so hard her eyes were shining with tears. “You deserve whatever you’re feeling for not paying attention to me the past ten minutes.”

  I shook my head, trying to remember the last thing I heard her say. “Weren’t you talking about Darla Lyons? I remember that part at least. Shit, I’m sorry, baby.” I stroked her knee and kissed her shoulder. “Are you going to meet up with her?”

  “I explained all of that…five minutes ago,” she said with an eye roll.

  “Tell me again, please…”

  She sighed but flashed a forgiving look. “I told her I’d meet up with her. If only to save face. The last time she saw me I was covered in my own vomit. And she was, too.” She paused when we got another strange look from our cab driver.

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “No. I need to see her on my own. At least I’m still dancing, because she’s going to ask.”

  I hugged her and pressed my mouth to her cheek. “You’ll have lots to say proudly, baby girl. West Side rehearsal was fucking fantastic the other night. You’re killing it at SoBe Sexy, too. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she wants to see you because she wants to catch up and know that you’re doing well.”

  “Why are you always so supportive?” Nikki turned to me and held my hands in her lap. She almost looked frustrated.

  I made a face and pulled her until her head was on my shoulder. “You keep waiting for a certain reaction from me, and it annoys you that you never get it.”

  Nikki sat up, still unsatisfied, her expression demanding more. “Just answer, please. How come you’ve never looked at me like what I did mattered? I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I don’t get it sometimes.”

  “What you did does matter. And you live your life like it does. Even without knowing who you were two years ago, I only see a beautiful woman with a good heart, who tries very hard to be better than she’s ever been. So that’s why I’m supportive. And sorry I blanked out a few minutes ago.”

  “Thank you, but you’ve been pretty quiet since yesterday. Is it weird being back on the West Coast? Are you nervous?”

  I shrugged but there was a knot the size of Texas in my throat. “Kinda. Never thought I would be back giving a talk as an alum.” It was surreal. Three years ago, I graduated with a six-month internship and the impossibility of How to Fuck up a Friendship. Now I was going to be on a stage next to guys who were innovators in their fields, who’d developed things I used daily. Things that had changed the way we communicated with each other. I was a guy with a popular web series who had sometimes filmed scenes in his parents’ house. What the hell did I know about trends and success in new media?

  The lush edges of Leeward’s campus finally appeared in the foreground. “I can’t believe you went to school here,” Nikki said breathlessly as she scooted closer to the door. We shot up the scenic palm tree-flanked road that offered one of the best views of the campus chapel, which was framed by hazy distant mountains. The mission-style sandstone and stucco buildings, with their wide archways and bright red roofs, came into view. “People are laying out! Oh my God! This place looks like a resort.”

  The cab dropped us off when we ran out of accessible road, and we walked the rest of the way to the auditorium so I could check-in for the event. The whole time the coordinator was speaking I was staring at my gigantic headshot on the banner behind her. Samira had taken that photo, just like I had taken hers, when we decided we were going to attempt to be a professional brand. I chuckled. We were still attempting. I wanted to call her and tell her about it, but she was still angry with me for not giving her a clear answer on where our partnership was going, and what my role was going to be in it. I’d told her I needed time to figure it out. She’d told me I needed to go fuck myself.

  Nikki grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the building, bringing me back to the present. She was clutching a map of the campus and chattering about ways for us to kill time. We were about an hour early. As she circled buildings with her pen, I glanced at my phone. A Miami City Prep alum was supposed to get in touch with me tonight about someone who could sell me a ninety-day supply of meds for seven hundred dollars. That was more than enough to get my work done and definitely kick this…habit?

  Was it a habit?

  “Ready, babe?” Nikki touched my arm, and my cellphone tumbled to the concrete. My heart almost jumped out of my mouth. She’d startled the fuck out of me. After I picked my phone up and I saw her smiling at me, my secret felt like it had just created a crevice between us. Something crushed inside me when I smiled back, and it made my chest hurt.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked when I intertwined our fingers. With a cloudless blue sky and students milling about in school t-shirts, campus looked like every brochure I’d ever received.

  “Man, I missed out on a regular college experience,” Nikki shouted a few minutes later. Eager to get a glimpse of everything on the 8,000-acre campus, she was ten feet ahead of me, snapping photos every two seconds. She’d tagged me in about a million of them so I kept getting notifications on my phone. “I went straight from the dance academy to SCB. The closest I got was the online public relations classes I took through USC that had video lectures.” She finally slowed down so I could catch up.

  “How long have you been dancing?”

  “Unofficially, since I could stand. Officially, since I was seven…a total of fourteen years before it all came crashing down. Then I pretty much couldn’t audition with any other company after that, given how things ended. Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I check out what SCB’s doing. Darla killed it this year. She was the lead in Sleeping Beauty and Giselle. Probably means nothing to you but major in the dance world. That’s Super Bowl ring epic.”

  “But can she jeté like you, baby? Because your jetés are pretty much the shit,” I said, just to hear her laugh.

  When we got back to the event, the place was almost at capacity. I showed Nikki where to sit in a reserved row up front. I was walking down the aisle toward the stage but she grabbed my arm. “You okay, baby?”

  “Yeah. Nerves.”

  “Well, your mom just sent me a text. She didn’t want to interrupt you. She said she’s watching a live stream of the event. Did you know How to Fuck up a Friendship was mentioned in Entertainment Weekly’s ‘The Must List’ during premiere week? She says this is exactly how she felt when she put your first Student of the Week certificate on the fridge. She also said she’s so proud of you.” Her face lit up. “I am, too.”

  “Means a lot. There’s no one else I wanted here with me.” I tilted her head back and kissed her. “I love you, Nik.”

  Shit.

  It ha
d slipped out, but her expression was so priceless I wanted to say it again. Right now.

  “You love me?”

  “I love you,” I said with more confidence than I had the first time.

  “I’ve been working myself up to say it. Then it felt like maybe it was too soon. And I didn’t know what you were gonna say…but I wanted to say it so badly.”

  “Well, now you know. And I do…like crazy.”

  “Good. I like crazy. I like it a lot.” Nikki hugged me. Then she whispered apologies as she squeezed past people already seated in the row.

  I didn’t talk much during the first half of the program, but then one of the other panelists directed a question my way about budgeting and cost-cutting methods during the first season of How to Fuck up a Friendship. I nailed it, aside from having to restrain my laughter every time I looked at Nikki and she gave me a wide-eyed, thumbs-up look.

  When the panel ended we attended a small reception before going to the next event at another college. Then we headed back to our hotel to get ready for dinner with my friends from college. I wore a navy button-down with gray pants, and Nikki had on a short black dress with a diamond-shaped cutout in the back. I slipped a few pills under my tongue while she was buckling her sandals. I didn’t want her to see. Sometimes when I took them in front of her I saw her tense up or roll her eyes. She kept quiet, even though we both knew the issue was bothering her. Elliott’s pills had brought me close to my high of the very first days of use. It was a stable, ten-hour euphoric rush. I could exist on cloud nine an entire day without a low. I had woken up every day this week at six, gone to the gym, given myself a boost around ten or eleven, powered through scripts the entire day—sometimes I remembered to eat—and then hung out with my girl at night. It was going to be hard to give this up.

  The front desk rang to say our cab was outside, and Nikki and I hurried down to the lobby. I ran my hand along her back as she ducked inside the car, and she grimaced. “You okay, babe?” I asked.

  “Funny story, actually,” she said, turning to me with an amused expression. “No one tells you how dangerous study carrels are.” We’d gotten carried away and had a quickie in the library before the workshop at the University of San Jose. Things had gotten a little rough. “It really should be printed in university brochures, for our protection. It’s a real problem.”

  I kissed the nape of her neck when I climbed in after her. “You should get a massage before we leave tomorrow.”

  “Well, if you can’t get sex related injuries with your best friend…” She trailed off when our cab driver cleared his throat, and we both failed at holding our laughter in.

  The drugs had my head buzzy, and I was ready to take her clothes off. I tapped my fingers up her shin to her knee, smiled, and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” Nikki smashed a grin to my shoulder.

  Her legs opened. My fingers moved inward in circles—teasing, slow. “No, you’re not…” she whispered into my sleeve, a tiny crack in her voice. She inhaled deeply twice, her thigh trembled, and the driver’s eyes flicked up to the rearview. Nikki ignored him, cupped the back of my neck, and angled her lips up to mine.

  It was hard to describe what happened to me when she took me in like this. It wasn’t a sense of being more alive but an acute awareness of her. Knowing the exact shade of brown in her eyes. The spot on her lip she always bit. The C-shaped scar on the tip of her nose. And the longer I stared the more everything outside of us shattered into a million insignificant pieces, until it was just her and me and a soundless world that stopped rotating.

  “You know what I regret? I should’ve told you I wanted to be with you the night of the premiere party. I was just as crazy about you then. We could’ve been like this forever ago,” I said.

  “Grabby?”

  “Yup. Could’ve been swinging each other’s dicks.”

  “You’re so romantic. Why were you ever single?” She snorted in amusement.

  “Waiting on you…”

  “Oh, you’re good.” She smiled, but then her eyes glimmered with tenderness, and she drew her thumb along my jaw. “Was it worth the wait, though?”

  “Every agonizing second. I would’ve waited longer if it still meant being with you in the end. I hope, no matter what, you and I are inevitable.”

  “Oh, you’re really good. And I love you, Charlie. I love you. I love you. I love you. I never said it back today,” she whispered against my neck. “But I do. I really do.”

  There wasn’t a whole lot to do in the immediate area around Leeward, but there was a downtown lined with restaurants, where students and Northern California’s elite warred over reservations, and a few bars that would have been dive-y anywhere else. “Damn,” I whispered when Nikki got out of the cab at Benihana. Her dress swung up to the top of her thighs, and I got a quick shot of cheeks.

  “I was wondering when I’d get my ‘damn’ for today. Even though you said it to my butt,” she teased as I paid the driver. I stopped her before we went inside, linked our hands behind her back and pinned her against the exterior wall under a light as gold as white wine. We got a disapproving look from an older couple walking by. “Baby, we’re outside,” Nikki whispered.

  “I just wanted you to myself for a few more minutes.”

  Her eyes sparkled with a wicked glow. Nikki ran her tongue over both her lips. “Yeah, right. You were probably thinking about boning me against this wall,” she said.

  I frowned. “Who the fuck says boning?” Wrestling her hands out of mine, she wrapped an arm around my neck. The kiss that followed was soft, but she gathered the front of my shirt in a fist.

  We somehow managed to calm ourselves down enough to walk inside. Eventually. “Remind me again…Joel co-owns a winery, right? But by day, he’s a…what?” Nikki asked.

  “Math teacher and one of my best friends from college.”

  “Okay…and Devin, who you met during orientation, is a Department of Defense contractor now. Mark is an anchor at a local ABC station. So that leaves Erin…the ex.”

  “Works in media.” I laughed. “And nothing you need to worry about. She just popped out a really cute baby with Jerron, her husband.”

  “Who said I was worried…” Nikki curled her arms around my waist possessively, and the hostess led us to the table. I hadn’t seen any of my old friends since graduation three years ago, but the way we greeted each other, it was as if no time had passed. I was happy for that. Glad that a lot of things from back then were water under the bridge now.

  After a quick round of introductions of everyone’s significant others, Devin shook his head at me, exasperated, holding up his phone. “Dude, when are you casting my role? How come Erin gets a character?”

  “You guys were watching How to Fuck up a Friendship just now?” I said, pulling out Nikki’s chair.

  “Yeah. Devin’s never seen it,” Erin said. “And you’re kinda late. We had to kill time.”

  “Fuck Devin. He doesn’t even watch. He doesn’t deserve a character,” Joel joked. “I watch, so if anyone—”

  “The Ari character isn’t really Erin. She’s just—”

  “Chuck’s rebound. I know. But why did you break Chuck and Sami up, anyway? They just got together,” Erin said. She rolled her eyes in pretend anger.

  “That is exactly what I told him,” Nikki chimed in, rubbing the back of my neck.

  Shit. They were all glaring at me, waiting for an explanation. “He’s afraid to be too happy with the past hanging over his head,” I said.

  “Does he even like Sami?” Nikki asked.

  “What?” I frowned. “He loves her.”

  “No, Charlie. I get that. But does he like her? Because here’s what I don’t get. He had this amazing woman in his life, and instead of taking a chance with her, he tortured himself and watched from afar. It’s like he’s drawn to her but doesn’t want to be. He blames her for him wanting her. And they’re so mean to each other. It feels so toxic sometimes. Then Chuck turns himself into the bad g
uy by breaking up her relationship, like he needs to eventually have a reason for her to hate him. Their current situation was fine.” She was right. Chuck and Sami were doing well the last few episodes. They were having sex, and they were sleeping in the same bed every night. Her ex had moved on. But then Chuck told Sami out of the blue what he’d done to her previous relationship, and Nikki had been upset about it since. In fact, the episode had probably gotten the most thumbs-down of any episode. “If he likes her, why can’t he just love her without this turmoil?” I stared blankly at her, but she had expected this underwhelmed reaction, so she shot me a defiant, displeased look back.

  “It’s ending this season, right? They end up together, right? If not, that’s so damn evil.” Erin almost looked feral. They were my first beta readers, so they all knew I’d taken pieces of our college years, but I had no idea any of them was really invested in How to Fuck up a Friendship after all this time. I felt like I was under a microscope, and I really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  The hibachi chef walked up right then, relieving me from the interrogation, and gave the standard instruction on how dinner operated here. He performed tricks with cooking utensils, like creating a volcano of onion rings, and then flicked pieces of food at the guys for us to catch in our mouths.

  Joel kept ordering shots, so we were drunk (most of us) by the time the theatrics were over; our table was probably the loudest one in here. “Can you believe Kev the bartender still remembered us when we got here tonight? Probably because we started the night of everyone’s twenty-first in this place,” he said to me.

  “Oh shit. We actually got kicked out during Devin’s. His lightweight ass couldn’t handle the sake bombs,” Mark joked.

  “Okay, I’ll take that.” Devin chuckled and tossed a balled up napkin at him. “But someone else had it worse, though. I remember having to go back to campus in a cab to drop someone off because they were too drunk to keep going. A bunch of us went out, anyway. Had to be Erin.”